The short life of the short URL

Jeremy Wagstaff   |  Mon, 09/14/2009 11:39 AM  |  Sci-Tech

This week's column is about the demise of URL shorteners.

You might be forgiven for not knowing that URL shorteners had once been great. Or indeed, for not knowing what an URL shortener is.

In which case, let me fill you in.

An URL is a web address: loosewireblog.com, for example. Now that's pretty easy to remember, and to type. But how about this one: news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8194395.stm?

Not the sort of thing you want to read out over the phone.

The problem with URLs is that they can get unwieldy, which makes them look ugly. Hence the rise of the URL shortener.

These came along a few years ago - 2002, to be precise - with a service called TinyURL.

What you did was paste your long, unwieldy address into a box on TinyURL's webpage, and TinyURL would give you a shorter address back: tinyurl.com/7sk2l, say.

A lot shorter - and, possibly, easier to remember. Or at least easier to remember.

Basically the short URL contains a code - the letters and digits after the slash - which the tinyurl server will convert back into the original address.

So if you click on a short URL, it will first go to the short URL service computer, and then on to the actual address you want to go to.

That's pretty much it.

The idea caught on, especially with the rise of services like twitter, where you only have a limited amount of space to say your piece. A short URL gave you a few extra letters to play with - and your tweet looks a bit cleaner too.

You have probably seen a few short URLs in this column.

All well and good, but problems have emerged.

The biggest one is the sheer number of URL shortening services that have sprung up. At least 100, according to Wikipedia (bit.ly/LQYZz - see?)

This has made it easy for bad guys to abuse the service. As more services appear, spammers and others use them to hide the fact that they're sending people to unwanted websites. You won't click on a link that says scantilycladfemalesRus.com (or maybe you would) but you might click on a link that says tinyurl.com/jSK4S.

But the biggest problem is something called linkrot. Linkrot is when a link ends up going nowhere, because someone or something has broken the connection.

Say a website is redesigned, and so links from other websites to its pages no longer work. Or a website dies or goes bust.

Or, in the case of short URLs, the service that provides the connection, via the code I mentioned above, closes down.

All those short URLs now go nowhere, with no way to tell where they might have gone - even to what website, let alone what page.

This happens quite a bit. And it's likely to happen a lot more, now one of the most popular URL shortening services, tr.im, has announced it's closing its doors. It's promised to keep the URLs going until the end of this year, but after that it's pretty much it.

I don't know how many URLs were shortened using tr.im, but it's in the hundreds of thousands.

This has woken a few people up to the dangers of URL shortening - all those links, now going nowhere - but there's no question that the practice has been hugely useful. Hopefully someone will come along with a way to do this that doesn't leave the web full of links that don't work. Or worse: short URLs that don't go to where their creator originally intended.

This all said, I'd recommend trying them out if you don't care too much about the historical aspect of your links.

Bit.ly is probably the best one - approved and used by twitter - and comes with some Firefox add-ons that make converting a link to a short URL, and then posting it to twitter, Facebook, or emailing it to a friend, a pretty painless process.

But the demise of tr.im has made me think hard about using these services - and the implications of their popularity.

The instant, real-time web is one thing, but we don't want to find we've also created a disposable web full of connections that no longer work.

That would not be a smart move.

(c) 2009 Loose Wire Pte Ltd

This story cannot be reproduced without written permission from the writer. Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com

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